


Full Disclosure

by Straight_Outta_Hobbiton



Category: Numb3rs (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amita is a Wonderful and Practical Girlfriend, Charlie is Desperately In Love with Amita, Charlie is Honest, F/M, Implied Government-Sponsored Human-Testing, Implied childhood trauma, No NSA clearance for you Dr Eppes, Post-Season/Series 04 AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-11-03 20:40:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20524196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Straight_Outta_Hobbiton/pseuds/Straight_Outta_Hobbiton
Summary: In the wake of Charlie's arrest, Amita finds herself on the receiving end of every secret Charlie has ever been too scared to tell.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> *shows up ten years late to the fandom with Starbucks and a weed pen*
> 
> Yo, I got fic and an undying love for Amita Ramanujan, the most levelheaded and rational member of the Eppes-FBI Team family.

_ If they find out I told you, they’ll kill us both. _

_ Well, I guess we’re going to have to keep it between ourselves. _

  
  


Amita knows there are things that Charlie doesn’t tell her. No couple is without its secrets, and Charlie, up until about three weeks ago, had a clearance on par with the Director of the FBI, which can sometimes complicate things. After all, Charlie is a very honest person, and he makes a point to never, ever lie to Amita.

  
  


_ There were eight of us— whiz kids, you know? Geniuses. They recruited us while we were still in school, before we could really tell them no. _

_ For what purpose did they recruit you? _

_ A program. It’s… it’s hard to explain. _

_ Try me. _

  
  


Amita is glad for the dark of Charlie’s childhood bedroom as they hide under the covers, their foreheads pressed together as Charlie stumbles through his story, breath hitching and voice cracking as he forces himself to breathe.

  
  


_ They wanted us to be thieves, among other things. Killers, eventually. _

_ Assassins? _

_ That’s a word for it. But it was more than that. It was… an experiment. _

_ The program, or you? _

_ Both. _

  
  


Charlie talks about months of specialized classes, his mother’s worried looks when he was woken and hustled out of their little house in the middle of the night, because in the program there were no hypotheticals or dry-runs— there was training, and then there was applying that training, and then it was doing it all over again, but harder this time.

  
  


_ I still don’t know what they did to us, exactly. There were a lot of injections— a lot of sleep studies and blood tests. I think they were trying to make us stronger. _

_ … Like Captain America? _

_ I wish. _

  
  


It hurts him to talk about it. He chokes on tears he can’t hold back, so Amita does her best to hold onto the shiver that threatens to creep down her spine as Charlie whispers metaphors about calves and cattle chutes across the inch of space that separates them.

  
  


_ I wasn’t meant to kill people. They never trained me that way. I was supposed to make it happen, though— I always could figure out exactly how to set it up, what would needs to happen, what failures to plan for… _

_ You were the leader. _

_ No, I was second-in-command. Alpha was our captain. She told us what we had to do, and I did what I could to help get it done. That’s how it worked. _

_ Alpha? _

_ That’s what we called her. _

  
  


He did it for six years, until the program as it stood was disbanded and restored, sans one member.

  
  


_ I wasn’t cut out for fieldwork, and my math didn’t interest them. They asked me to retire, and I did so, gladly. My last few missions… they hadn’t gone well. I was tired of it. _

_ They don’t keep tabs on you? _

_ I worked for the NSA, so they didn’t have to. Now, I’m not so sure— the house across the street’s for sale, though, so they’ve got an easy way in, if they cared enough to bother. _

_ Will they try something? _

_ You mean kill me? After so long? I highly doubt it. _

  
  


Amita has nightmares for weeks after he starts talking. She’s lucky— Charlie sleeps like the dead, which means she can gasp out a startled sob or two without much more than a sleepy grunt from the other side of the bed before she rolls over to muffle her sounds in her pillow. She doesn’t want him to see this— this  _ weakness, _ because Charlie, lovely, sweet, sorrowful Charlie, won’t understand it, and it will hurt him.

(She doesn’t cry because she’s scared— though she is very, very scared. She cries because Charlie’s telling her everything he can think of and all she can think is  _ you were only thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. You were too young for them to ask these things of you.) _

(He would shut down if she said those things aloud, though, so she keeps her peace and stays quiet. He’s always been sensitive about his age, and she doesn’t like to think of the ugly expression that she knows he’d make if she tried to use it as an excuse— even if it’s less an excuse and more an explanation.)

“I love you,” she promises him in the dark. “I love you Charlie. I love you.”

“I love you too.” His voice is raw and raspy in the dark, but his answer comes quickly, like he couldn’t bear to leave her in doubt for even a moment. “Amita…”

Charlie is a mess of a good man with a guilty conscience, undeserved as it is. And if he thinks he needs penance in the form of this little rebellion, well, there’s nothing Amita can do except make sure he’s still standing by the end of it… if there ever is an end.

The NSA doesn’t restore its clearances lightly, after all.

  
  


*.*

  
  


Charlie shows her the lockbox he keeps hidden under the loose floorboard at the back of his bedroom closet, the hiding place cleverly disguised by a much bigger and flashier fire safe settled right on top. Inside, he has a number of things— driver licenses from ten different states and passports from America, Canada, Israel, and Germany, all with different names but his photograph. Money— mostly American, along with a dozen others— plastic-wrapped in tight rolls of hundred dollar bills and stacked according to country, An address book, listing safehouses in fifteen different countries as well as the United States. A phone, loaded up with the numbers of everyone who’s ever owed him a favor. A notebook, listing in detail each of these apparent favors.

He has passports and licenses with Don’s face on them, too, and it’s shocking enough that Amita can’t help the expression she makes when she looks at him, her hands full of forged documents.

Charlie shrugs, looking sheepish.

“After Crystal Hoyle…” he trails of, shaking his head. “I thought it best to prepare for the worst. He doesn’t— he doesn’t _ know, _ though. About the passports, or— or anything else.”

Amita swallows, looking down at the passport declaring Don to in fact be one Jonathan D. Carruthers in her hands.

“Does that mean you’ll be having some made for me, too?” she asks, meeting his eyes carefully from under her loose hair. “Since it’s best to prepare for the worst.”

Charlie’s mouth twists.

“I’d like to,” he says. “But I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”

Amita nods, gingerly replacing Don’s passport back in the box.

“You’re not using my school ID photo,” she tells him, sitting back on her heels. “It's awful. I’ll go and get a picture taken tomorrow for you to use. Something better.”

Charlie smiles, and it’s all relief.

“You look great in every picture,” he tells her, replacing the lid on the box and locking it before slipping it back into the space under the floorboards. “But if you insist…”

“I do.”

He doesn’t stop smiling even when he leans in to kiss her, easy, like he hasn’t just shown Amita a dozen items that could get him locked up for a very, very long time if anyone learned he had them, and Amita…

Amita kisses him back. Warmth blooms in her chest, the same way it always does when he touches her, and privately, she makes a note to maybe have Charlie take her to the shooting range.

Just in case.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A second chapter, because I'm trying to dig myself out of a depression hole and I've hyperfixated on Numb3rs.

The called the recruits in his program_ hounds. _The implications of that make Amita’s lip curl when she thinks about it too long, so she doesn’t, focusing instead on distracting Charlie from the sorrow that’s started to eat at his hollowing cheeks and deepening eye sockets. He sleeps too much and yet it’s never enough, and he only eats what Amita and his father can force down his throat.

Don hasn’t stopped by the house for longer than a few minutes in weeks. He’s still angry, unable to reconcile his brother’s actions with the trust he puts in the system he’s sworn to uphold. Amita figures it’s a hazard of dedication— she’s met more than one scientist applying more faith than reason to their theories, and she’s watched Charlie tear them all down.

He won’t do that to Don, though, because Charlie knows he can be cruel, and he knows he won’t be able to keep his head; neither of them will, because they’re more alike than they aren’t (more alike than Don will ever know), and for all that Don pretends at a stiff upper lip, he’s just as bad as Charlie when it comes to emotional outbursts. So, Charlie lets him be, sinking further and further into the safety of his own misery as spends more time in bed than at his chalkboards, not quite asleep, but certainly not awake, either.

Unless, of course, Amita is home. Which she is, usually, having drawn away from the FBI in favor of classes and Charlie.

Amita forces him to play the teacher again as Larry furtively fills out paperwork in Charlie’s name and has him officially put on sabbatical, demanding lessons in sleight-of-hand and pickpocketing and whatever else she can remember him mentioning until he drags himself out of bed and obeys. He teaches her German, claiming it to be his best language, but sometimes, now, when they’re alone in the kitchen of curled up on a blanket under the old oak tree in the backyard, he whispers to her in French, Italian, even Russian, and even if Amita has a just-barely high school level grasp of only one of those languages, it isn’t hard for her to guess what he’s saying.

“I never thought I’d find someone like you,” he tells her one night, his face hidden by the wild mane of overgrown curls he’s developed in the month and change he’s been in seclusion. “I never thought I’d find someone who could— who could bear it.”

“You say it like you’re a burden,” she says, squeezing her fingers where they’re tangled with his. “You’re not. Not to me.”

Charlie makes a face like he doesn’t believe her.

“It’s true,” she insists, rolling onto her side. “You’re… challenging, sometimes, but that’s not a bad thing. Anybody can be a challenge.”

Charlie swallows, bringing their entwined fingers to his lips.

“I know I come with a lot of baggage,” he murmurs, breath hot where it ghosts across her knuckles. “And I know— I know I haven’t been good company, lately—”

“If you’re about to offer me a way out, I’m going to punch you,” Amita says, pulling her hand away. “You mean more to me than a shady government project and a few weeks of melancholy, Charlie— you’re _ mine. _ Do you understand?”

There are words Amita thinks, but doesn’t use. Charlie would scoff at words like_ soulmate _ or _ the one, _ and anyway, Amita can’t exactly provide him with an algorithm that proves it. Even his own work couldn’t prove her theory of them— not yet, anyway.

Scooching forward, she tucks his head under her chin.

“The math works,” she says instead of the words she has rattling around inside her head. “You and I, we work, just as we are. And we wouldn’t be the way we are if all the things that happened before we met didn’t happen.” She presses a kiss to his hair, his hand warm where it comes to rest on his hip. “I am angry at the things they made you do, Charlie, but never, _ ever _ think I love you in spite of it. I’m here for you, Charlie— _ all _ of you, good or bad.”

Charlie sighs.

“I don’t deserve you,” he tells her, as if he hasn’t heard a word she’s said. “I have no idea why you love me.”

Amita snorts.

“Then maybe you should get back to your cognitive theory and figure it out,” she says. “Since it seems pretty obvious, to me.”

Charlie groans but doesn’t argue, nose pressed into the hollow of her collarbone. For a minute, they’re silent, nothing but the sounds of the LA evening to fill the air.

“I miss Don,” he says finally, his voice small.

Amita rubs her thumb across the soft skin behind his ear.

“I know, Charlie,” she says. “I know.”

  


*.*

  


Charlie disappears for a weekend. He lies through his teeth to his father about some conference up in Seattle, but in private, he tells Amita he’s meeting with an old contact, alone.

Friday, Saturday, and then Sunday pass before Charlie shows up again in the awful, early hours of Monday morning. Amita, who hasn’t slept since he’d pulled out of the driveway Friday afternoon, is waiting for him when he kicks off his jeans and settles into bed beside her, reaching over her head to flick on the lamp on her side of the bed.

“These are yours,” he says, holding out an unmarked manilla envelope. “Three sets of each.”

Amita can feel the hesitance in Charlie’s frame as he watches her open it, tilting it so its contents fall into her hands.

Three passports, three social securities, three driver licenses, and three birth certificates, all with the pictures she’d handed Charlie a week after he showed her the contents of the lockbox. One passport— the German one— even has a permanent resident card to go with it, expired visas stamped into the pages of the red booklet to make it all seem perfectly legal.

He’s nervous of her reaction; of course he is. It’s one thing to know your boyfriend has fraudulent documents hidden in the bottom of his closet— it’s another thing entirely to know that he’s made you fraudulent documents to match, even if she_ did _give him permission.

She ignores the sudden bottomless nature of her stomach and leans into him instead, reaching for the social security cards still attached to the perforated half-sheet they all start out in and bringing them into the light.

“‘Amber Chatterjee,’ ‘Aabha Kaur,’ ‘Harshleen Lanka-Stein.’” Amita looks up. “You have a passport that says Stein too, don’t you?”

Charlie goes pink.

“I thought it would be easier, if we ever had to go,” he says, sheepish. “It wouldn’t be safe to travel together if something came up, but… people treat you differently when you’re married.”

He’s worried he’s overstepped, that he’s being presumptuous, tying them together like that. Amita doesn’t mind, though— the warm tingle that develops in her chest as she looks at the German passport indicates quite the opposite, actually.

She leans up to kiss him. He lets her, mouth soft when he presses back.

“Do you think we’ll need to go?” she asks when she pulls away, because she needs to know. “Do you think we have something to worry about?”

“No.” Charlie smiles reassuringly. “But it’s best to prepare for the worst, right?”

Amita is getting the feeling that the phrase is something of a mantra for Charlie. It isn’t the worst she’s ever heard.

“You should put these with the others,” she says, keeping her body tight against his side as she collects the documents and slips them back into their folder. “And get ready for bed.”

Charlie sighs, relief making his body go lax and heavy against hers.

“I missed you,” he murmurs, wrapping an arm around her middle.

“I missed you too,” she says. “And I’d like to be able to make up for the last three days of an empty bed, so you should really go shower, at least.”

She can feel Charlie grin against her elbow.

“Five minutes,” he promises, pressing another kiss to her shoulder before rolling off the bed.

“And not a minute more.”

Charlie gives her a dramatic bow, a silly grin on his face as he scoops up a clean towel from the pile of clean laundry she hasn’t put away yet and tosses it over his shoulder.

“As the lady commands.”

There’s a rare bounce in his step as swans out of the bedroom, somehow beautiful in ratty boxer shorts and the faded t-shirt he’s probably been wearing since he left on Friday.

Amita didn’t know it was possible to love someone this much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm here, I'm queer, and I want to corrupt Charlie Eppes with government shittiness.

**Author's Note:**

> I have many Ideas as to how to perhaps continue this...


End file.
